The future of any community is obviously dependent upon its youth. High school graduation rates within a community are indicative of the future employability of the age cohort emerging from the school. Also, graduation rates are an important measure of the quality of a school.

Youth Wages, 19-21

Wages for young workers act as a lure to retain and attract young workers to a community. This graph illustrates monthly salaries of college-aged workers (averaged across each quarter). They do not include health care, retirement, or other fringe benefits.

Youth in Poverty

This figure displays the proportion of the county's youth living in poverty. The federal poverty line is scaled by family size and income. Importantly, a far higher proportion of children live in poverty than adults because single parents are the most often impoverished. These data are important because they tell a community a great deal about how large the at-risk youth population may be.

High School Graduation Rates

The chief cause of dropouts among young women is pregnancy, while academic performance and behavioral issues is the chief cause among young men. Students who do not graduate from high school will, almost without exception, have difficulty earning a living wage, suffer substance abuse problems at far above the national averages, and tend not to migrate as frequently as those with high school diplomas.
Sadly, a high school diploma is no longer viewed as proof of even modest literacy and numeracy skills, while the absence of a high school diploma is often viewed as evidence of marginal literacy in labor markets.

Ball State CBER Data Center (cberdata.org) is a product of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State
University. CBER's mission is to conduct relevant and timely public policy research on a wide range of economic issues
affecting the state and nation. Learn more.